Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

First light gold stripes the grasses
    stretches and stresses on the grass

We’re thankful it’s dawn these warm bed mornings

    Outside, the clearest sky
                             inside, the red room
waiting for the tree to blossom its leaves
the poison trembles its time

and the laying down of its long five years
The tree pent up for deliverance

Into the dark house, treading up stairs as though on glass,
cans ungathered, your mouth soaked like a cake on Guinness

and brandy laced, a dark beard of a week’s staining, your lost
child eyes, the bawl of anger brought short    here I am

hanging on. I only wish those who praise the wildness of wine
could see your 3ft. crawl through cans. One yard of life.

        The tree bears its strains of summer living, reddening
under the long delay of this clear warm autumn

Spreads out the tapestry of its crinoline skirts

Red rashes on your hands, back and crotch as wine flushes out,
no more a wino, stigmata of the nails. Let’s drive a train

without brakes and crash all its carriages in wanton pillage
of dead and dying, of bones jarred from limbs. It’s great.

Unfreeze ourselves from being driver or passenger. A train
off rails. Not even that. Just a yard to crawl and crawl back

through the can enclosure. On the phone thirty messages unread.
But you walk out, dragging up off the bed, your own Lazarus.

Turning wine into blood
                      wine into blood
any fool can turn blood into wine

The tree is dressed in rose-red leaves
shedding its poison     red stars

What’s beautiful is this curing of itself    this flamboyant
leafdrop cleansing     the unharbouring of poison

The tree detoxifying for its own good

The leaves are the colour of rouge     the cheeks we used to have
                                                                                     when young

painted by the north light

the room reddens its red walls     Life waiting in the buds